The New Impressionists

by Blake Gopnik

From the Editor: The following article first appeared in Toronto's The Globe
and Mail, on Monday, April 17, 2000. Those interested in the psychology of perception
or who have an interest in art will find it particularly intriguing. Here it
is:

A few years back some waggish art-history
students were looking for a mascot for their departmental association. With
much hilarity--a laugh a minute, we art historians--they settled on Giovanni
Paolo Lomazzo, a less-than-celebrated sixteenth-century critic and theorist.
The joke? Lomazzo wasn't always right-on about art. What with him being blind
and all. But turns out now the joke may be on them. John Kennedy, a professor
of psychology at the University of Toronto, is busy showing that paying close
attention to the blind may tell us a whole lot about art after all.

Over three decades of experiments the
Irish-born scientist has shown that the blind can make and understand pictures
in ways that no one had imagined. And that fact forces us to rethink many of
our preconceptions about representational art in general.

"We can do an awful lot more with
senses that we regarded as being limited," explained Kennedy, an inveterate
enthusiast whose gift of the gab confirms his place of birth. "You'd have
to be intellectually dead not to be excited by the idea that we may have thought
about representation in much too limited a way for much too long."

Kennedy's excitement about his research
seems to be spreading to the broader academic community. In 1993 Yale University
Press published his seminal book, Drawings and the Blind. Right now Oxford University
Press is releasing an entire volume of original essays on the subject--including
one by Kennedy, a pioneer in the fast-growing field. (Full disclosure: I became
a Kennedyite some years ago when I was the token art historian in a research
group of his.)

If we tend to think of pictures as eye
candy, it isn't hard to make them finger food as well. Take a sheet of plastic,
set it on a soft support, draw on it with a ballpoint pen, and any lines you
make turn into little ridges just ready to be explored by the fingers of the
blind.

Or better yet, give them the pen, and
they'll make pictures just about anyone--sighted or blind--is likely to recognize,
by sight or feel. A credible cat, a man standing or lying down, a water glass,
a chair, a bathtub--all produced by blind people who've never looked at those
things in their lives, who've certainly never seen a drawing or touched or drawn
one before. Within a few minutes of taking up the pen, a person who has grown
up without sight can move from the skills of a two- or three-year-old to the
skills of a kindergarten kid, to those of a grade-schooler, even, for those
with a special knack, to junior-high-school level.

Their pictures may not seem impressive
works of art, but when you think that they were made entirely by touch and show
a world only ever known by feel, they become a minor miracle.

Meeting me for lunch at the Art Gallery
of Ontario--frequent field trips take the scientist out of the lab and into
museums--Kennedy, a sprightly fifty-seven-year-old with a mustache and antic
eyes, waxed eloquent about the many and varied implications of his work. "It
always seemed that [pictures] should be anchored in vision, and that all our
thoughts about them should be about them as visual matters." For generations
of scholars and theorists--including Kennedy, who got his start at Cornell under
the great perceptual psychologists James and Eleanor Gibson--the psychology
of vision seemed the obvious place to go to figure out how pictures work.

"What we're learning from the blind
is that that's only half the story. Vision may be a route into the part of the
brain that understands pictures, but it isn't the only route. . . . It seems
that another road that leads to the center that understands pictures can be
touch."

Of course, like the sighted, not all blind
people are particularly interested in the images that tickle that center. But
when they are, there's no stopping them.

One evening awhile ago Kennedy went to
test a man. His subject began by pointing out what seemed like a no-brainer--"I
can't draw. I'm blind"--and then spent two hours immersed in drawing. "My
God, I can do it." At 9 p.m., when Kennedy suggested calling it a night,
the man asked for more time. When 11 p.m. rolled around, he still wasn't ready
to stop. "At 1 o'clock in the morning, he was willing to let us go,"
laughed Kennedy. Seems that a fascination with pictures may just be so natural,
you'd have to be more than blind not to see it.

And that is one of the crucial findings
of Kennedy's research. Over the years various skeptics and relativists have
tried to argue that realistic pictures are as artificial as, say, the shapes
of the alphabet, and that culture--especially Western, imperialist culture--teaches
us to use and understand pictures the way it teaches us that ketchup goes with
fries. But Kennedy's work is the final nail in the coffin for such improbable
conceits.

"If a blind person who has not had
a picture in their life before . . . produces a picture for the first time when
we say, `Take up thy pen, and draw,' then that says whatever they're producing--if
it's immediately recognizable to other blind people and to sighted people--is
not arbitrary. It's a fundamental universal of perception and cognition."
Picture-making isn't some artificial invention of oversophisticated elites.
It ties right in to the deepest parts of the human brain--to a place so deep,
in fact, that it's equally accessible to both sight and touch.

And when we find out something's wired
that hard and deep in the brain, we shouldn't be surprised that people get pleasure
from fooling around with it--that they like exploring pictures and making them.

One of the reasons we like representational
art so much--and have since at least the days of our cave-decorator ancestors--is
that we don't have to learn to grasp its basic content the way we do with texts
or many other symbol systems. Images hit us "where we live, right away,
intuitively, implicitly. . . . I've seen people look at pictures, and tears
came to their eyes immediately."

But the other reason we like it so much
is that, no matter how automatically we all may get the subject of a realistic
picture, it took hard, rewarding work for our ancestors to become really good
at making them. (Whether artists should still win kudos for simply using those
ancient inventions is another matter.) By studying the blind, Kennedy can watch
the learning about picture-making that the sighted spread out over decades and
that cultures spread out over centuries happen overnight. "I've seen blind
people who begin to enjoy drawing coming up with systems, then discarding them
and inventing a better system. I have seen one person move dramatically from
'I'm just showing the front of an object' to 'I'm showing foreshortening,' which
is generally five or six years later in sighted people."

That some blind people can actually understand
the basic principles of foreshortening and perspective and even begin to apply
them spontaneously in their drawings is one of Kennedy's most flabbergasting
discoveries. One blind man called Ray made a picture of a table with its four
legs splayed out, as though looming forward at the viewer, and the tabletop
between them smaller, as though farther away. "He said expressly, 'This
is from underneath.' And then he said, 'I'll give you another drawing,' and
he drew it from up above. And then only the rectangle of the top was shown--no
legs, he said, 'because the legs are hidden behind.' I realized that this man
understands how to use a vantage point in a drawing."

On the one hand this is extraordinary.
Perspective--the set of precise rules that tell us how to draw nearby things
larger than what's far away--is the ultimate tool for making realistic pictures,
but it was invented only once, in Renaissance Italy. "Everybody gets it
from them," said Kennedy. So you might expect it to be the last thing blind
people would ever come up with on their own. On the other hand, the reason perspective
works so well--and the reason many cultures have come up with informal versions
of it--is that it capitalizes on our most basic understanding of where things
are in the world around us and how they relate to where we are. "It's about
the direction of parts," said Kennedy, explaining his crucial insight.
"And that's not something inherently visual."

For the sighted vision simply discovers
the same things about the world that touch reveals to the blind. "Blind
people understand a lot about the directions of objects in the world. They often
have to judge where they are with respect to objects as they move around in
the world and change their vantage points." A blind person who didn't have
a rich idea about the way the world's laid out, and how things change around
them as they move through it, would be permanently chair-bound. And that's something
Kennedy is keen to help prevent.

Kennedy's work with blind people started
as an offshoot of his work on pictures by and for the sighted. But years of
working with the blind and spelling out how rich their vision really is have
made him something of an activist. The old idea that training for the blind
should be about protecting them from the world has to give way to helping them
explore it to the full. Giving them the chance to make and read pictures can
have a part in this exploration, just as it does for the sighted.

"Many of the blind people that I've
been asking to participate in my experiments have then said to me, 'I would
like to show you something,' and have taken the materials for making raised-line
drawings and made drawings of subjects I would never have dared ask them to
draw." One blind woman, having just discovered drawings, lamented the lack
of picture books in her own childhood and asked for drawing materials so she
could try her hand at making some for the next generation. "I remember
one blind man who said 'This is wonderful. I've always wanted to make drawings.
But people told me I was blind, and I couldn't do it. But I can do it.'"
Only give them the chance to explore the magic of pictures and, like sighted
people everywhere, the blind will jump at it.

"Many blind people are very proud
of the fact that they can get on the TTC, go to Pearson Airport, get onto Air
Canada, fly to a foreign city, make their way around, use tactile maps, get
tactile diagrams and pictures of things, go to seek things out. Go to art galleries,
knock on the door, and say `I want to know what's in here.' Go to museums, and
say, `Lemme know which things here I can grasp, and which things are too fragile
and too precious for people to put their fingers on. I'm interested. I want
to know about these things.'"